Lovelock (16 page)

Was that, too, a product of my conditioning? Was any part of myself still natural and unprogrammed?

This was getting to me, I could see that. My judgment was being distorted, badly. Carol Jeanne did
not
sound like Mamie, not even for a moment. It really
was
true that her project was of vital importance, and it was absurd for her not to be exempted from Workday this week so she could move in and establish herself in the scientific community on board the Ark. Just because I now understood my true relationship to Carol Jeanne did not mean that she was always wrong. She really
was
a genius. And there really
were
thousands of young scientists who would give anything to be able to work with her as closely as I did.

Anything? Would they give up any hope of sex or reproduction? Or would they think that was a monstrous price to pay? They would condemn even the idea of it. No human being is worth such a sacrifice.

Unless you can get a dumb monkey to do it.

In exactly what sense was I smarter than Pink?

My job was done. And when I got back into the kitchen, so was breakfast. Except for a miserable little bowl of monkey chow and a lousy segment of dried grapefruit.

A message was coming in on the kitchen computer, and Red was reading from it. “It’s our Workday assignments,” he said. “Dad’s going to the fish hatchery. He’s due there in a half hour. We’d better get him out of bed. Mom, they want you at the pre-school with the girls.”

Mamie groaned, but Red shut her up with a wave of his hand. “You’ve always told people how good you were with children, Mother. Now you get to demonstrate it.”

In my new clarity of mind, I realized that this was not like Red, to respond to his mother so sharply. Something was different about him. Was he taking charge of his mother, just a little?

“Here come
our
assignments,” he said. “Carol Jeanne, you and I are going together. They want us at the cannery. We’ll have to hurry—all the assignments start at nine.”

“Do we
have
to go?” Lydia asked.

“If there were any justice in the world—” Mamie began.

“We all
get
to go,” Red said to Lydia, ignoring his mother. He turned from the monitor to encompass us all in a beatific smile. Carol Jeanne, Mamie, and Lydia scowled at him in unison. “That’s why we’re awake for this voyage instead of sleeping through it—the Ark will only succeed if we all work together.”

Maybe Red was right, but his exaggerated enthusiasm didn’t win any converts. Carol Jeanne stood to clean the cereal bowls from the kitchen table. Emmy left the table and ambled toward her bedroom; Lydia followed, probably planning to torment her. Even Mamie sniffed at her son and then scurried away to rouse Stef from bed.

After getting directions to our respective assignments, Carol Jeanne and I left the girls with Mamie and went to the cannery with Red. I was pleased with our assignment. Processing food with heat and steam was so archaic that no one on Earth had seen a cannery in more than a generation. But on our new world we would need a way to preserve food without refrigeration. Working in this cannery would be even better than going on an archeological dig, because instead of delving through potsherds we could experience firsthand how humans used to provide for themselves before being freed by technology from such primitive rites.

There was only one cannery on the Ark, a fair-sized plant that was easily accessible by tube from any village. Red led the way as if he had been living on the Ark for years.

We found the Mayflower contingent sitting in a corner of the cannery waiting room, waiting under a handmade sign that said
MAYFLOWER
. The first person I saw was Penelope. I wondered if she made the Workday assignments. From what I had seen, it would have been typical for Penelope to delegate Mayflower’s celebrity to the task that she herself would be doing.

“Do you see Liz?” Carol Jeanne whispered. I climbed atop her head and surveyed the Mayflower group, and although I recognized dozens of people from Odie Lee’s funeral, Liz was nowhere to be found.

“It figures,” Carol Jeanne said when I shook my head no. “There’s one rational person in Mayflower, and she’s off doing something else.” I tapped Carol Jeanne’s watch, but she only shook her head. “Liz isn’t late, Lovelock. She won’t be here. We’ll just go off in a corner and work by ourselves.”

Carol Jeanne was right about Liz, but she over-estimated her ability to hide in a corner. There
is
no corner on an assembly line. Everything in a cannery is done communally. Our project this Workday was stewed tomatoes. The humans donned aprons and tucked their hair under scarves or caps. I was warned to stay away from the line lest I shed into the food. There was a long-winded recitation of safety rules and an even longer-winded generic Protestant prayer for our safety. From the expression on Carol Jeanne’s face, I could see her thinking: Weren’t they carrying this communal religion thing a little far? But it was religion that supposedly bound Mayflower together, so no doubt we’d still be praying long after we knew the routine well enough to skip the safety lecture.

During the prayer I scanned the room. Everything was mounted on tracks; there were identical tracks on the wall-that-would-become-the-floor. All the tables and equipment were clamped to the tracks. At changeover, curved tracks would be inserted between the floor tracks and the wall tracks, and the equipment would be rolled from the old floor position to the new. The power sources were located near the corner, midway between—the equipment wouldn’t even have to be unplugged.

We gathered around huge vats of boiling water, where Penelope demonstrated how to blanch tomatoes by dunking them in the water just long enough for the skins to burst. We took our stations around the vats, blanching tomatoes and then discarding the skins. We dug out the stem ends with paring knives and threw them into troughs of running water at our feet. Then we quartered the pulpy remains and put them in giant kettles to simmer.

I say “we,” but the word is woefully inaccurate. As a witness I was allowed on the cannery floor, but I was not allowed to handle the food or even the utensils that touched the food. I was meant to stay in a corner, probably, but I rejected that advice and stayed with Carol Jeanne. I perched on her shoulder, fanning her and keeping strands of hair tucked under her scarf and out of her eyes.

Even my presence was too much for some people. One of our co-workers was the hatchet-faced Dolores, whose loathing had made Odie Lee’s funeral dinner such a delight for me. Half the tomatoes on the conveyor belt weren’t as red of countenance as the sweating Dolores. The steam that permeated the cannery was hot enough to color even her scarred epidermis.

Whenever Carol Jeanne bowed her head over a tomato, Dolores curled her lip at me. I thought of producing a little jewel of a pellet to throw at her, but I didn’t want to be permanently banned from food processing areas. So I waved and blew a kiss to her instead. She didn’t bat an eye. She had appointed herself as the cannery’s capuchin watcher, and she observed me vigilantly to see that I kept myself away from the food. As soon as I realized what she was doing, I knew I could torture her cruelly with just a little bit of effort. Changing my position on Carol Jeanne’s shoulder to give me a little more leverage, I dandled my tail as if to caress the pulpy fruit. I held it over tomatoes, less than a half-inch from their surface, as if that prehensile appendage had eyes to admire their redness. I never got close enough for Dolores to sound the alarm, but I made sure I was
always
close enough that an alarm was imminent. Dolores moved closer so she could keep an eye on me—a maneuver that no doubt delighted Carol Jeanne.

For her part, Carol Jeanne assiduously tried to keep her distance from people, choosing the farthest vat of water to blanch her tomatoes and then coring and peeling them at the far end of a long table. But her efforts were futile. In case anybody had not known who Carol Jeanne was, Penelope told them. During breaks, men and women gathered around Carol Jeanne as if she were calling numbers at a bingo game. As they worked, they smiled at her and tried to include her in their conversations. But they were soon chilled by her tight-lipped smiles.

The more Carol Jeanne withdrew into herself, the more animated Red became. He organized a group of volunteers to run the onions through the chopper, and then he absorbed the worst of the onion fumes by positioning himself closer to the chopper than anyone else. Why had he taken the most odious task in the process upon himself? Because he knew it would endear him to the community. I realized his plan at once. Carol Jeanne might have unassailably higher status on the Ark, but Red could easily best her in Mayflower village, and it was Mayflower where they actually lived.

I had to give Red credit. He understood Carol Jeanne enough to know that her introverted personality would put her in the worst possible light. He also knew his psychology well enough to know how to make himself shine by contrast. He even
sang
as he worked, onion-tears running down his cheeks as he bellowed an aria from
The Barber of Seville
. The others were delighted. Even
I
was impressed. Red was actually good at something. Good at sucking up, that is, not singing.

Poor socially-obtuse Carol Jeanne actually thought that his singing was annoying people, and told him to hush up. The only result was to provoke other people to glance at each other and raise eyebrows or wink. Poor Red, they were thinking. She might be a genius, but she was a harridan wife with no sense of fun. Poor Red, poor wonderful fun-loving generous-hearted Red. Thus even Carol Jeanne’s ineptness helped Red win a place in their hearts. I could hear the gossip already.
She’s
as stuck-up as you might imagine, but the husband, Red,
he’s
a gem.

When the onions were chopped, Red and his disciples diced celery together. Red abandoned
The Barber of Seville
and launched into a chorus of songs from ancient Broadway musicals
—My Fair Lady
and then
Camelot
. A few of the others were Broadway buffs, and joined in on the refrains. I noticed that Red managed to include “How to Handle a Woman” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” which subliminally—or perhaps quite openly—made the others think of him as a patient man dealing with an impossible wife. He was really sneaky, and I found myself admiring him for the first time.

Admiring him? I should have been outraged. This was my beloved Carol Jeanne that he was hurting.

Then I realized with relief that the very fact that I was not automatically sympathetic to Carol Jeanne in this little domestic contest meant that I had found one of the boundaries of my conditioning. I might get a rush of pleasure from my implants whenever I complied with one of Carol Jeanne’s commands, but I wasn’t forced to think loyal thoughts all the time, and I wasn’t punished for sympathy with her rival. The implant couldn’t read my thoughts or feelings—it only responded to my actions. After all, I didn’t get the pain response the night before until I actually did something physical about my generative thoughts. And my pleasure came from the physical act of complying with Carol Jeanne’s command. They might enslave my body, but they could not control my mind.

Of course, that might mean nothing more than the fact that they didn’t think my mind was worth controlling. As long as my body did their bidding, what did it matter what I
thought?

The women who had first surrounded Carol Jeanne soon abandoned her to join the excitement at Red’s table. This would normally have been a boon to Carol Jeanne, but she was not stupid. She was only too well aware that she had been weighed against Red and found wanting. People withered around her, but Red inspired those same people to work harder and more happily. I knew that even as she did things that put people off, Carol Jeanne longed for their acceptance. She just didn’t know how to go about winning it, and none of her natural responses helped. It was the bane of her life, her inability to connect with groups of people. Her extraordinary success as a scientist had made it unnecessary for her to win people over—they all spent their time trying to win
her
over. But on the Ark, she couldn’t remain with scientists all the time. Being in Mayflower village would be almost like high school again. Poor Carol Jeanne. You didn’t know what you were in for when you dragged us all onto the Ark, did you?

After the ingredients had been simmered together, the workers dished portions into vacu-board containers to be sealed. Only then did we break for lunch, a spartan affair served in reusable nylon sacks to each of the unpaid workers. Each sack contained a sandwich, an apple, a cookie, and a carton of milk. Carol Jeanne was not given an additional lunch for me, so she bequeathed me half her apple. It was hardly a satisfying meal.

Red’s new friends congregated around him during the lunch break, just as they had on the cannery floor. This was more than Carol Jeanne could stand, so she hurriedly ate her lunch and then wandered off by herself to inspect the cannery.

The cannery was a massive structure—but, because of the structure of the Ark, it was long and thin, exactly as tall as it was wide. There were fully a dozen groups processing batches of food, although tomatoes were apparently in season right now. Steam hung low in the building, and it occurred to me that Pink must be having a hard time in the artificial heat. Then I realized I hadn’t
seen
Pink since the process began. With no means of dissipating heat from her body other than rolling in cool mud, which was hardly available here, she must have excused herself to wait outside for Red. Once again, Pink had proven her uselessness as a witness.

We continued our tour of the plant, watching as quality control experts analyzed the contents of vacu-board containers to make sure the processing had gone well. Then we tried to enter another room, but that door was locked.

“You can’t go in there. It’s the extraction room,” said a voice behind us. I turned to see that Penelope was less than two paces to our rear. She must have followed us, unless she had learned the art of materializing wherever she was least welcome.